Princess Anthro-Puma Saves the Enchanted Fairy Forest

BAH! Ghastly continuity rears it’s spiteful many-horned head!

I wrote this comic intending to post it before Josh, Eli, Denise and I attended the Avatar preview screening event, but since it is only just now being posted (4 hours after the screening) I can go into more detail than I had originally planned.

Today was “Avatar Day” which basically means a lucky few geeks across America were shown 16 minutes of finished footage from James Cameron’s Avatar in eye-blistering IMAX 3-D. EyeBLAST IMAX 3-D is so special that you have to wear giant laser space goggles to view it without having your eyeballs turn to dust.

As the comic says, I think we were all a little more pumped for Avatar BEFORE seeing the full trailer. The geeks news sites and leaked teaser images painted the picture of a movie with exotic aliens, battle-mechs, and space marines on a hostile world. The trailer essentially gave us exactly that for about 30 seconds then quickly metamorphosed into a 14 year old girl’s deviant art fantasy comic brought to life.

I think @aric said it best:

Avatar is a dolphin away from a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper.

It even appears to closely resemble a recent children’s CG movie called Delgo. I’ve never heard of it and apparently it did horribly at the box office, but the resemblance is certainly noticeable.

Luckily the footage we saw renewed my interest.

SLIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD!!!Continue reading→

If You Strike Me Down…

Through sorcery and witchcraft (or possibly bitchcraft) Josh managed to get us (even Eli) tickets to the 25 minute preview of James Cameron’s Avatar. Apparently the high demand for tickets made half the internet fall over and burst into flames. I’m not 100% sure of the details of this event, but rest assured that I will fill you in either during or after the showing. I do think it’s a little unusual to hype a movie up to the extent that fans are clambering for tickets to a portion of the film. It borders on hubris and we all know that when you have hubris, Hugh gets the tip of his penis cut off.

James Cameron’s Avatar Masters CG, Struggles With HTML

A couple of things:

I have been doing more live streams of comic drawing lately. Follow me on TWITTER to know when they will happen. I’ll answer your questions and we’ll listen to good music. It’s a fun time and brings back some of the community we lost when we stopped doing live podcast shows.
My mole inside the production of TRON: Legacy has sent me the ultimate geek trophy. Almost exactly a year ago, he bought a print of my TRON/Lebowski mashup comic to hang in their production office. Then the director saw it and ordered one too. I sent them a handful of prints and asked that if the chance ever arose to please get Jeff Bridges to sign one and send it back to me. LOW AND FUCKING BEHOLD, MAN. New shit has come to light!
I will be at Baltimore ComicCon October 10th and 11th. If you are in the area, come see me. I’ll have books, some shirts, stickers, prints, maybe some buttons, who knows?
I did an interview with PopTen.net. GO READ IT!

IT’S A [tourist] TRAP!

I saw District 9 this weekend and it was fantastic. I wholeheartedly recommend it to any scifi loving geek out there. I heard this from a lot of people, and I can’t agree more that District 9 was unlike any movie I have ever seen. I’m not saying it was the most amazing movie I’ve ever seen, just that it was unique. It told a story I have never heard before (alien apartheid) in a way I have never experienced. I don’t know how else to explain it, other than to encourage you to see and enjoy it.

The film didn’t seem to follow any established Hollywood conventions. It smelled like an indie film made for $20,000, but it looked like a blockbuster with an 8 figure budget. As far as the alien effects go, District 9 features the most believable onscreen CG actors I’ve ever seen. The alien’s (or Prawns as they’re called) blended in with the humans and the bleek scenery of their shanty town perfectly. You never questions whether or not they’re real. They’re just alive. A good comparisson would be the non-CG orcs in Lord of the Rings. You know they aren’t really orcs because orcs don’t exist, but you don’t think they’re fake because they are clearly humans underneath the makeup and armor. That’s the sense I get from the Prawns.

Anyway, go see it and have fun.

If you’ve seen the film, please feel free to post your thoughts in the comments. PLEASE BE MINDFUL OF SPOILERS since this is still the first week of release.

PREORDER THE FIRST HIJINKS ENSUE BOOK! [In the HE Store]

Lots of District 9 news and links this week:

So Sad We All

Threeboot, bitches! New term. Just invented it. You may use it sparingly with my permission. [UPDATE: Yes, I now know that the term “threeboot’ was coined by fans of Legion of Superheroes back before the dawn of time. LET ME HAVE MY MOMENT!]

I honestly can’t think of any other recent threeboots, unless you count The Incredible Hulk and The Hulk. The Edward Norton version was a loose sequel to the Ang Lee version, so I don’t know if threeboot status applies. Regardless, the idea of Bryan Singer re-rebooting Battlestar Galactica this soon after the end of the SyFy SciFi TV series just seems ludicrous (even though he had the idea nearly a decade ago). The geek community at large still has Sixes and Starbucks and Final Five Cylons on the brain. We’re still reeling with the revelations of season 4 and the intense disappointments of season 4.5. I don’t think we’re quite ready to move on. It’s like breaking up with a girl then immediately dating a different girl with the same name. All your friends would look at you weird.

Now to play Cylon’s advocate: Ron Moore’s BSG series borrowed very little from the original. Many of the names were the same but the characters had virtually none of the same traits as their 70’s counterparts and often not even the same gender. The Cylons in the original series were created by a long dead race of alien lizards so there aren’t really any parallels in that respect either (though I would have preferred “Alien Lizards did it” to “Mommy issues and Jesus did it”). Since the two series were related almost in name only, is it possible that Singer could reboot the original without affecting/tarnishing Ron Moore’s BSG? I think it is. Bryan Singer made both of the good X-Men movies, so we know he has it in him to do this up right. Of course he also made Superman Returns, so there’s a good chance the humans will fall before the Cylon threat because they spent the entire movie running around crying like sad vaginas.

Honestly, the Ron Moore-boot we all loved for 3 (maybe 3 and a half) didn’t even really need to be called Battlestar Galactica other than for instant name recognition and potential nostalgia appeal. It could have been called Battleship Galactitron, or Spacelaser Hyperdrive Boat and I still would have watched it. This new-boot movie probably won’t resemble MY BSG enough to truly make me angry at it. I want to approach this with an open mind because I want more good scifi on TV and in the theaters. What would be super rad is if this movie is so popular they turn it into a TV series. Then the universe would implode.

The Time Travelers Wife Has A Lot Of Free Time

Every man I know who sports both a penis AND a vagina twixt his thighs says I should totally read The Time Travelers Wife and have a good cry into my matching brassier and panties. Do they really expect me to see a “sci-fi” movie that seems to have more in common with The Notebook than Blade Runner? Ah, but they weren’t suggesting I see the movie. They were suggesting I explore the source material, which is apparently a very different time traveling animal. Even those fans of the book seem to have the same misgivings as I do about the movie.

Knowing myself as well as I do, I realized I will certainly never read the book so I did the next best/worst thing and read the plot synopsis on Wikipedia. I’m sorry, vengeful Internet! I just had to know what was up with this quantum leaper and his spouse. No spoilers, but it’s actually a very cool story with a wonderfully tragic ending. Maybe that was a spoiler. If you don’t like tragedy, make sure to see the movie because they changed the ending after focus groups said it was too much of a downer. Movies, after all, aren’t supposed to make you feel sad, or uncomfortable, or angry or be anything but an escape from our mundane lives into mundane fantasy. I guess that’s why I’m having such a hard time selling my screen play about the plight of African AIDS babies getting sold to warlords to work in diamond mines. It’s called “Look Who’s Talking and Has AIDS: Baby Blood Diamond.” All the babies would be voiced by Wayans’s.